And beware, there are infidels at the gates ready to rend it asunder -- we decided to yank our kids from the school today, in protest of the Lock Down Drill being foisted on our kids in the name of anti-terrorism. We're going to take them shopping instead, as it seems that for all the commercialism and materialism that may deck the malls, that world is still nonetheless within the seasonal message of goodwill and hope that maybe, just maybe there is the slimmest chance that some child-in-arms Prince of Peace may someday make all such terrors of young hearts a thing of the past. Let's have a drill to lock-down into that concept, eh?

The kids, on the other hand, are a little disappointed. "Oh, but it's so much FUN!" they do protest, "we get to hide under the desks, even in the teacher's closet!" -- yeah, sure thing kids, crazed gunmen in the hallways hunting the blood of school children, reduced to a christmas pantomime, a pageant scene from a video game. Fun fun fun. Thank you oh so much Most Honorable Minister of Education, for I am so sure all their lives are oh so much richer by this experience.

Like the way my Grade 10 English teacher so fondly remembered the Bay of Pigs. At least the older women of Toronto's HK Chinese community remember the Japanese soldiers in the hallways, and why they had to desperately un-pretty themselves to avoid far worse than a quick bullet, and how no imaginable drill could save them, and I do wonder how those women now feel as their grand-daughters are being taught to simply stand on the toilet seats.

Such things don't form any part of the Modern Enlightened Ontario lock-downs, so far as I know. Duck and cover!, kiss your ass goodbye. Praise the Lord, pass the ammunition. Its 'Quake on Ice' for the youngsters, and this way boys to the ROTC ...

Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't it empirically true that the only such and exceedingly rare elementary school shootings in the history of this nation have involved adolescent gunmen, students in fact, who, as such, would have been present for these drills anyway and thus, hence, ergo, hip to all the lock-down tricks?

just a thought.

Another is that if they wanted to do a safety drill with any realistic probability of happening, it should be on what to do should a rabid fox slip into the school, or were there a black bear in the playground. In all probabilistic fact, y'know, there are two flights per day Winnipeg to Toronto that pass directly overhead, yet not a single terrorists' cruiser, and if they want fun, what better for the snow-bundled kiddies than a realistic re-enactment of Episode One from Lost?